Some incremental changes, such as environment switching and improved iOS support, come to TACO, and the group adds a TACO blog for regular tips and tricks. Update now allows for using TACO with Visual Studio Code.

UPDATE: Since we wrote this article, the Visual Studio team just announced today that TACO can now be used with Visual Studio Code. "With this extension, you can debug hybrid apps, find Cordova-specific commands in the Command Palette, and use IntelliSense to browse objects, functions, and parameters," writes Ryan J. Salva, a principal program manager with the Visual Studio Client Tools team, in a blog. Salva notes that the "TACO extension is adaptable to the JavaScript framework of your choice," which means it can be used with Ionic, Onsen, PhoneGap, and others.

It currently supports debugging on Android and iOS-tethered devices, as well as emulators and simulators for those platforms, with Windows device support coming. To get it, go to http://code.visualstudio.com. -- Michael Domingo, Editor in Chief

The Visual Studio team has released what appears to be an incremental Update 5 to the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova that includes improvements in environment interoperability and iOS support, as well as slew of bug fixes since the last release in November. The group is also touting its blog, where developers can get TACO tips and tricks on the regular.

One nifty change is the ability to now switch between the command line interface or Visual Studio for working within TACO. Switching between the environments and you'll see changes reflected immediately.

There's also a work-around when working with Node 5/NPM 3 and some Cordova versions. "Right now, NPM 3 does not work with Cordova versions 5.3.x and lower," writes TACO program managers Linda Zhong and Jordan Matthiesen, in a blog. "In Update 5, if you are targeting a Cordova version older than 5.4.0 and you have NPM 3 or higher, we will fail your build and show you an error message with suggestions for fixing your build."

The specific issue is covered in a new TACO blog started by the group at http://microsoft.github.io/vstacoblog/, where you can dig into the details of the compatibility problems and suggested work-arounds. The TACO team will be posting there regularly, so stay tuned. (In fact, when the group released a TACO update in November, they had already begun the process of centralizing most of the support and documentation through a separate blog site at http://taco.visualstudio.com.)

A few other new features: support for iOS 6 simulator; ability to use MSBuild from the command line; and a "global" version of Cordova that will reinstall the right version based on NodeJS version being used, among others.

TACO U5 also rolls up a number of fixes, including a Ripple security issue, erroneous success messages with failed plug-in installations, and broken builds when adding MySQL to a project, among other fixes. A good run-down of features and fixes is in this release note.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at mdomingo@1105media.com.